Not all businesses are ready for public cloud solutions due to security concerns, legacy applications that don’t integrate, lack of cost benefits or other concerns. This means many organisations are looking to build a private cloud environment to host the company applications or desktops with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Providing the backbone of the enterprise cloud has become a complex burden for any IT department. The requirements to do more with less and to be on top of server management, application provisioning, complex storage arrays and application performance is a demanding task.

In medium & large organisations there is a strong need to build solid virtualisation solutions for both servers and desktops. Today more than ever selection of the right technology platforms to support environments across Hyper V from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and others is a time consuming proposition.

When selecting a vendor for your platform it is important to consider the sophistication the vendor brings to the solution including the ability to manage the storage directly from the OS, thin provisioning and compression capabilities, speed of backup and how well deduplication is handled to reduce backup capacity required whilst improving backup speeds.

Whether you are looking for a domain controller, an email server, a SQL platform, a SharePoint farm or a VDI platform these tools need to be able to be deployed quickly using plugins and APIs to streamline operations. The systems must scale efficiently and deliver when required. It is now essential to have systems that take a building block approach and allow you to scale up or down easily.

The real test of your private cloud is in the hands of the end users of the platforms. If their applications or desktops have been centralised and they can work effectively on all their applications from wherever they are then you have gone a long way to meeting the business objectives.

When you embark on a selection process for your private cloud, consider the following:

Complexity of design:

If the solution requires multiple vendors and multiple integrated technologies the design phase and quoting process is going to blow out as well as introducing risk in that if any of the integrations don’t work as they should the outcomes may not meet objectives.

Cost of solution:

Finding an efficient way to build a private cloud is essential. If you select the wrong technology partner then it will be overly expensive to scale your solution as it grows in popularity across your enterprise.

Availability of local support:

Local hardware support is essential for attending to urgent technical issues (e.g. a part failure). Consider the availability of trained specialists who can speed up deployment and troubleshooting when you need to change something quickly down the track. Your IT department may not be big enough have all the internal support for the platform so knowing where to find good partners can be essential.

In summary, if you are looking for a private cloud server virtualisation environment then you will do well to select a single vendor solution that is simple, efficient, flexible, well supported and powerful.